


Sea Creatures and Fishermen

by The_Oneironaut



Category: The Walking Dead
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-13
Updated: 2020-10-13
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:14:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26989603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Oneironaut/pseuds/The_Oneironaut
Summary: *This will get very dark and explicit, starting in the next chapter. This is my first fanfiction, and I would really appreciate any kudos, reviews, and constructive criticism.*“Well, Beth. So far so good. Can you tell me how you’re feeling?”How is she feeling? She feels like death warmed over, and if that’s the case then she likely is death warmed over. A coffin spun around in a microwave, the molecules of its contents vibrated back into this dimension.
Relationships: Daryl Dixon/Beth Greene
Comments: 15
Kudos: 31





	Sea Creatures and Fishermen

  
  
There’s darkness.

Thick and heavy, cocooning her. It’s deep, like she’s in the ocean. Fifty miles of dense black water, in all directions.

It can’t be water though, ‘cause it ain’t wet. Doesn’t feel like much of anything, but it’s all there is. If she felt the need to breath, it would be suffocating. She doesn’t.

She’s moving around in the blackness. It’s faint, but yeah... she’s swaying, back and forth. Softly, then sometimes with a muffled jerk. Muffled, like her senses are wrapped snugly inside a thousand wool blankets.

There’s no sound from anywhere in the void, not for what feels like hours. Then there it is, all around her. Nothing but a gentle, lilting breeze cutting through the not-water at first. Repetitive, a mantra, slowly gaining in volume each time.

“‘M sorry, Beth... ‘M sorry... ‘M so sorry, Beth.”

It doesn’t make any sense and she doesn’t particularly care, anyway. Not about who ‘Beth’ is. Not about the sorrowful chanting whisper, or the stuttered inhales between them.

It’s okay. It doesn’t matter. Whatever’s wrong, whoever you are... whoever I am... it doesn’t matter.

It’s peaceful in the gentle, midnight-black abyss. This person should be at peace like she is, and she wants to tell them so, but she isn’t sure her mouth exists here, much less her voice.

It’s an eternity before anything changes, and yet she hasn’t had a single thought since, so it’s hard telling the passage of time. She’s lifting upwards, creeping like a glacier. Going nowhere but to more darkness, but it’s something different all the same.

A bright slash, sudden and sharp, cuts through the black, and it thickens until the light swallows the dark in a celestial display of victory.

She must be in outer space, the gravity pushing against her every atom, rendering her motionless. An exploding star right in front of her. Heatless, but with all the energy of a dramatic cosmic event.

Or the more likely scenario, and much more thrilling, is that she’s been on the trek to Heaven this whole time. Left her body behind somewhere on Earth, and now she’s finally made it, all with no effort on her part. She’s staring into the misty haze, through the white gates that have opened especially for her.

Heaven is set on a grid of some sort, apparently. Fuzzy grey outlines of squares against the clouds. Then God’s hand appears, and he must be a giant. He waves it at her, open palmed. Up and down and up and down. It’s not the introduction she was expecting, if she’s being honest, but seeing any part of the Holy Father is enough to quell all the expectations she had had of Heaven since she was a little girl. They don’t matter, however it would be is how it would be, and surely it would suit her just fine.

She wants to greet him, use her manners and properly say ‘Hello’. Her throat has other ideas, because it’s filled with rough sand. Maybe she isn’t where she thought she was. Maybe she was sent in the other direction, and the misleading arrival was just the first of an eternity of creative punishments.

Her throat.

She can feel it now, even if it is a scorching desert. But what about the rest of her? She tries to focus as best she can. It doesn’t make sense. Her body was somewhere else, and now she’s back inside it somehow. It would probably be pretty hard to torture an incorporeal girl in Hell, she reasons. Gotta have something to make hurt.

And _God_ ,  does it hurt.

Her brains are still stuck in the vacuum of outer-space, threatening to break free any second if all the pressure in her skull is any indication.

“Beth? Can you hear me?” Someone’s saying. They’re too goddamn loud, and her head throbs worse than before.

Dragging her tender, half-blind-from-the bright-light eyes to the owner of the hand that had been waving in front of her face, she sees a man standing over her left side. She flicks her gaze frenetically around from the man to their surroundings and back.

Where is she?

It’s obviously some kind of healthcare facility, a hospital most likely. They all pretty much look the same. There’s a window on the wall to the right of the stiff bed she’s on, looking out over a city and the dark grey roof of a lower level of the building. The rays of sun beaming in through it add insult to injury to her pounding brain.

She’s laying on a bed, in a pale blue hospital gown which is wrinkled awkwardly along her back, the lumps pressed firm between her and the matress, with no blanket over her. That would be fine, since the room is muggy in the absence of air conditioning, except that her legs are bare and the hem of the gown has crept up to only just shield her naked privates from view.

A whiteboard is attached to the wall in front of her feet, with scrawling doctor-speak notations written in black marker under a name: Beth Greene.

She looks back at the man, who is clearly not God. A doctor, judging by the white lab-coat he’s wearing with various inkpens and gadgets stuffed in the breast-pocket, and the black stethoscope hung around his neck. He pushes his thick glasses up his nose, the glare of the lenses vanishing to reveal his rodentine eyes staring at her in wonder and a gleeful kind of shock.

His plastic name-tag, as well as the other name at the top of the whiteboard next to hers read: Dr. Edwards.

That’s right. She knows him- but not enough to entirely relax as he continues to loom over her.

Memories pool inside her mind, filling in the emptiness that was there, like an old well with rapidly rising murky water. And it’s not stopping with him. Her name, the one he called her, Beth. She’s Beth Greene, daughter of Herschel and Annette Green. Half-sister to Maggie and Shawn, though she never liked to use the ‘half’ part.

Out of all her blood-related family members, only Maggie is still alive. At least, she prays that she still is.

The world has ended, rotten corpses infesting the streets- the monsters responsible for the deaths of most of her kin.

She’s at Grady Memorial Hospital. Unless, of course, there’s more than one preserved and half-functioning hospital nearby.

Replays flicker to life behind her eyes. Dawn telling her that a group of belligerent savages had come, demanding to let them have her. She told Beth only how many people there were, as well as one name. Rick Grimes. There was no way that Rick, a man she hadn’t seen in almost a year, could have found her here.

The only explanation was that it was Daryl’s doing, she was certain of that fact. She recalls gathering the small amount of things she had accumulated, as well as her disgusting clothes she had arrived at the hospital in, into a cheap and flimsy, but brand new backpack. Nothing could have convinced her to put the rags that used to be her pale yellow polo and chunky knit sweater back on.

Instead she chose to wear her jeans, cleaned but not rid of every tiny particle of death. Her cowboy boots. Someone else’s pair of thick socks, whether taken from a patient, or a dead woman laying someplace unmoving or up walking around still, she didn’t know. Her brown leather belt, with the knife holster still attached but missing her cop-stolen knife. A dark denim jacket that was at least three sizes too big for her, over a clean hospital scrub top.

Dawn had insisted she give the shirt back, since it didn’t belong to her of course. Beth wanted _so_ badly to stick her nose in the air and give the hag the finger, but tact was now a virtue -a necessity- so instead she adorned her most kicked-puppy-est eyes, lifted her old polo which was torn in several places and still reeked of decay and sweat, and sighed softly. Dawn had rolled her eyes and gestured at the scrub. Sucker.

She wanted to wear at least _something_ clean, even if it was only baggy hospital scrubs. She liked feeling clean here. That was just about the only part she liked, but it wasn’t the only reason for protesting Dawn’s suggestion.

After almost a month of that face, _that face_ ,  the one he gave her in their funeral home, in silent communication of what exactly she still isn’t sure of, showing up time and again just as clear as if he were standing in front of her as she mopped, tried and failed to sleep, sang to the patients-turned-prisoners... held a girl down while they sawed her arm clean through. Anyways. His image and his voice had haunted her, and she had welcomed it- indulged in it to escape and to keep her standing on two feet. She held on to both the mental apparition of him as well as her stubborn _faith_ that one day they would find each other.

It was finally happening, and she wanted to look better, cleaner... at least _different_ than she had looked in all their time alone on the run together. He had come all this way to rescue her, with likely not much to go on as far as tracking. The least she could do was look nice for him, set his mind at ease a little bit about where she had been all this time.

He had most assuredly put all of the blame on himself for what happened. That’s just how Daryl was, always beating himself up over things he thought he should have done differently. If she came out looking anything like how this Hellhole made her feel, his guilt would have intensified beyond reason, at magnitudes greater than even he was prone to.

There’s the memory of her walking down the hallway, with a conscious Carol being pushed in a wheelchair alongside her. It had seemed too good to be true. It obviously _was_ if she’s still here, so damaged that she can’t find the strength within her to move more than her eyeballs.

Then there’s her seeing Daryl again. Anticlimactic as far as what actually happened, but it was as if he was transplanted from her vivid daydreams of him and spliced into the moment. Surreal. He was standing at the end of the hall at the forefront of the rest of her family, past what felt like a sea of strangers blocking her path to him. Holding his faithful crossbow, aimed half ready for a fight as it pointed chest level at the people of the hospital.

There were a dozen little toads doing summersaults in her guts. She didn’t look at anyone else, her eyes locked with his across the distance. His wide baby blues were partially hidden behind his still-overgrown hair, but she could see the wetness gathering in them- threatening to spill, even as his face remained set in stony resolve.

If he hadn’t looked at her so hard, so deeply that it felt like he had pushed into her thoughts, then all this time she could’ve been merely imagining that something was there between them, before they were torn away from each other. But he did, so maybe she wasn’t. Wasn’t crazy, a stupid little girl with a crush. Or maybe she still was.

Everything is blurry and spliced together oddly. She knows she walked up to him slowly at one point, still unsure if any of this was actually happening or if it was just a cruel dream. His warm hand enveloping her small shoulder, guiding her behind him. She didn’t want to break the connection with their eyes, but she relented eventually, stepping past him close enough that their arms brushed. The split second of heat from his dirty skin pressing on hers could have lasted a decade, and she would have been perfectly fine with that. Instead it was over all too quickly and she was behind him, turning back around.

The well has filled to its brim, close to spilling over the sides of her jagged stone edges. She doesn’t know what happened after that, no matter how hard she tries to remember what came next, and how and why she’s still in this godforsaken place. It always felt like a prison, and still does. Not anything like _their_ prison. That was a home, despite its architectural intention. What she would give to be back in her cell there, her remaining family close by, instead of trapped in this sickeningly clean cell of a hospital room, alone in all the ways that matter.

Tears prick her sore eyes, leachate of the memories she was suddenly assaulted with, as well as those that still elude her. She blinks quickly to shed them. Dr. Edwards has been flipping through pages on his clipboard, writing down who-knows-what about her, and now he’s pulling his stethoscope off his neck, putting the ends in his ears and the chestpiece over her heart through the thin material of the hospital gown.

His caterpillar brows are drawn together, focusing somewhere over the side of the bed at the shiny floor, at the wall, at the rolling table by the window barren of the flowers that might be there in a different life, at what exactly she can’t tell. His glasses look far more haggard than the rest of him, the only thing about him that seems fitting of the state of ruin the world has become. They’re held together with not quite clear scotch tape on the bridge and the right corner where the stem attaches, and both the lenses and the frame are littered with scrapes and pockmarks. That’s different. His glasses had always looked brand new- a result of him being sheltered from the outside since the start of all of this.

He catches her watching him as he retracts the stethoscope and returns it to its place on his neck, and he gives her a nervous smile.

“Well, Beth. So far, so good. Can you tell me how you’re feeling?”

How is she feeling? She feels like death warmed over, and if that’s the case then she likely _is_ death warmed over. A coffin spun around in a microwave, the molecules of its contents vibrated back into this dimension.

She tries to respond, but all she accomplishes is pushing out a quiet, rattling rasp that sounds far too much like a walker for her liking.

“All right then, give it some time and your voice should come back.” Dr. Edwards says. He doesn’t sound all that sure of his own words.

“Uhh, let’s see,” he frowns in thought for a moment, and sits down on the rolling stool with his hands resting on the edge of the mattress. “Can you blink once for yes, and two for no for me, Beth?”

She blinks once.

“Good, good. Okay, do you know who you are?” He’s speaking to her like a child and she wants to say  _ No_, so that hopefully he’ll stop talking and leave. She doesn’t, instead she blinks once again.

“Do you know who I am?”

One steady blink.

“Can you remember what happened to you?”

Which part? So much has happened to her, it would fill 50 journals if she recorded everything. She assumes he means why she feels like shit, so she blinks twice for him.

His gaze drops down to his hands and he twists his lips for a moment before taking a deep breath.

“You were about to leave the hospital with some friends of yours, but before you could, Dawn shot you,” He pauses, “In the head.”

Shot in the head?  She blinks furiously, trying to wrap her mind around that. Why would she do that? It’s not like they were best friends, but Beth had _killed_ someone for Dawn. What could have so drastically changed the dynamic from them in her room as she packed up to leave, to Dawn trying to kill her? And how is she still alive? Dr. Edwards has at least some answers to her unspoken questions, and for a moment she panics that somehow he can read her mind from her brain being hooked up to the various monitors.

“We saved you. _I_ saved you. I really wasn’t expecting you to wake up so soon, or for your vitals to be as strong as they are. Given that you haven’t moved at all I’m assuming you have some degree of paralysis. It’s unknown at this point if this is temporary or not. We’ll have to wait and see.” He pushes the glasses up his nose again, avoiding eye contact with her, then he rises from the stool and goes to the whiteboard to jot something down.

It’s then that she happens to look past where he was previously standing, and her gut wrenches at what she sees, like she was punched hard in the belly. There are two metal and grey vinyl visitors’ chairs against the wall, one of which has the backpack she was wearing on her way out, and in the seat next to it lays a single item. A folded black leather vest that she would recognize anywhere, its tattered denim wings discolored with blood.

Dr. Edwards puts the cap on the Expo marker with a high pitched squeak, and turns back to face her. She looks from him to the vest repeatedly, attempting to ask the silent but crucial question: _Where is he?_

“ Ah, yes. Well, after you were shot, the man wearing that carried you out of the hospital- to the _outside,_ ” He says with obvious distaste. “After he killed Dawn, of course.”

Daryl killed Dawn... after Dawn shot her in the head. But where the hell is he? And why does it sound like that doesn’t sit well with Edwards? Out of anyone, he should be happy to be free of her, and she clearly deserved it. An eye for an eye, and all that. Or in this case, a bullet in the head for a bullet in the head.

Edwards walks slowly back to her side, and slumps onto on the stool again, scooting it up closer to her, and looks her in the eye with a crazed wideness in his own. “He shot her almost immediately after she shot you. Just... _bam_...  no hesitation. And then he cried and didn’t stop crying until...well,” He looks away from her like he’s been sucked back in time.

“He cared for you. A lot. It was obvious. And it’s not hard to guess why. I know you don’t want to be here. For some reason I can’t fathom, you’d rather take your chances out there than stay here when it’s safe. But Beth, we care for you too.” He takes her hand, laying limp at her side, in his own sweaty one and covers the back of it with his other hand. She wishes more than anything at this moment that she could move, could rip her hand away from his and run into the terrifying _outside_ and find her family. Or at least be on her own, away from him.

“They told me I was crazy when I insisted we do something to _try_ and help you. But it worked didn’t it? I _saved_ you, Beth. I did more than that redneck and the rest of your people did for you.” He practically spits.

“Do you know what he did for you? He shoved you in the backseat of an old Impala, and left you there. They all did. I was watching from the roof. And then...” He looks away again and swallows thickly.

“This is gonna be hard to hear, and I’m sorry, Beth. They were overrun by a herd not a minute later. It was awful, I don’t think any of them made it. Daryl was lagging behind from carrying you and then putting you in the car. He was the first to go down.”

No. Absolutely not. No, not Daryl. There was no universe where he would be the _first to go down_.  He was Daryl Dixon. He was gonna be the last man standing. That’s how it was supposed to be. She wasn’t supposed to outlive him, especially not after taking a bullet to the brain. If that couldn’t kill her, then a herd couldn’t have killed Daryl, that’s for damn sure.

Except her soaking wet face and increasingly unsteady breaths tell her that she isn’t really sure. He could really be gone. She could never again have a chance to feel the searing heat of his skin, pumping hot blood coursing through his veins because his heart still beats in his chest.

Could never again lock onto his pale blue eyes, haunted with much more than she could ever comprehend, or hear his deep grunts for answers, like a caveman speaking his own language that she had just started to learn. His rare smiles -flashed unexpectedly that would trap her breath in her lungs so violently, as she prayed to God he wouldn’t notice- could never again light the angelic face that now was either completely still and sunken for eternity, or gnashing away unceasingly, rotten either way.

A world without Daryl Dixon. It never seemed so bleak until now. Shambling bodies that used to be human, trying and often succeeding in tearing apart flesh and families, had nothing on this.

Beth was shuddering hard, apparently she _could_ move her body, if only subconsciously. A byproduct of tragedy, and not in any way that would be useful. That was too much to ask for.

Dr. Edwards releases his unsolicited grip on her hand, to wipe away tears from her cheeks. _Just leave them, get off me._

“Hey, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have dropped all that as soon as you woke up. Guess I was right to assume you cared a lot about him too. That’s why I went and got that,” He jerks his head vaguely behind him.

Oh right. The vest. Like an appendage of his, but scarcely enough to make up for the lack of him. It’s so entirely _Daryl_ , that it couldn’t possibly take to having any other owner. Yet it’s hers now, because it damn sure isn’t gonna fall into the hands of anyone else. And it’s a single drop of water from an ocean of what could soothe her, that at least she has this piece of him.

As he hangs a bag of clear liquid on the metal rack by her bed, Dr. Edwards says, “I’m gonna give you a sedative now, let your brain rest and keep healing.”

He fusses with the IV tube with fumbling hands, then pierces the needle through the cannula on the inside of her elbow. The room grows fuzzy again, as it was only minutes before as she woke. He leans over her and presses a kiss to her forehead, mostly chapped lips scraping her skin while the inner parts of his lips leave slug-like moisture in their wake.

“Sweet dreams, Beth,” He whispers.

She gladly slips back into the promised tranquility of the void.


End file.
